


Savior of the Dreaming Dead

by adjourned



Series: Rose and Dirk metamorphose into giant space snakes when they meet maybe [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe - Alternian Invasion, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, Alternian Empire, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multiverse, Post-Canon, Sadstuck, Slavery, Space Stations, The Homestuck Epilogues, Ultimate Dirk Strider - Freeform, humanity lives on a spinning space wheel ruled by alien overlords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 09:10:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20889656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adjourned/pseuds/adjourned
Summary: Dave finds an uninvited visitor in the colossal Skaianet reactor powering the last remnants of human civilization.They have an interesting conversation.





	Savior of the Dreaming Dead

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Grand Battement of the Learned](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19227817) by [Opacifica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica). 

> This can be read without Savior of the Living World, but both stories will make more sense if you read that first then this.
> 
> I wasn't sure whether to set this to inspired by Opacifica because I already did that with the previous work in this series (and I'm not sure what the etiquette is for inspirations in general?), but it's technically true, so I went with it.

Dave jolted awake to a sharp spasm of pain down his spine.

"Citizen DS413. " _Ow._ "Report to sector GS1025. Unauthorized breach detected. Investigate and secure."

The boy pushed himself upright on trembling hands, gingerly rubbing the electroshock implant in his C7 vertebra as he swung his legs over the edge of the cot. Fuck. The one time he managed to get some good sleep, Ψiion just had to wake him up for some menial busywork dredged from the depths of its blackened, circuitous heart. What was it now? Dave slipped his PDA out of its compartment above his head and unlocked the device.

He stared at the words on his screen.

"Psi?" he called softly. "Isn't that the Green Sun reactor core? What the fuck am _I_ doing there?"

Dave heard rustling from the upper bunk as Dirk grumbled something half-asleep and incoherent. The system announcement must have woken him as well. Dave grimaced. He'd have to continue this outside; the poor dude needed the rest after that last batch of drones from Centauri. D-Class scouting got the midnight calls, but he didn't envy Dirk's job the slightest.

Rising from his bed, Dave took a few unsteady steps towards the door, motor skills booting back up as he went. By the time he reached the authentication pad and pressed a palm to the handprint outline, Ψiion had finally finished processing his malformed query.

"Unauthorized breach detected. Investigate and secure," his PDA helpfully informed him.

The light above the pad turned green and the vault door slid open with a ear-scraping screech. Dave stumbled through and lifted a proton rifle from the rack next to the exit as he went, slinging the weapon over his shoulder.

"Yeah, you already told me that," he mumbled, scanning the corridor. The night guard was usually more chill than the day enforcers, but he'd rather not bump into any trolls at all if he could help it. Most of them didn't give a shit if you were on authorized business: they beat you up if they thought they could get away with it, which was practically all of the time.

"Is this a solo dispatch?" he grumbled. "I know it's just going to be a rat or some blueblood's pet meowbeast, but I'm all I'm saying is if someone's trying to sabotage the station core I'd appreciate some backup."

The AI fell silent as Dave made his way down the hallways of dilapidated steel and flecked rust, passing other sealed human quarters. It took a few minutes to traverse the length of the residential arc, most of it spent tiptoeing past the warden suites and ducking into storage closets whenever he heard the guttural rasp of troll voices. He tried not to think about what those colored stains in the closets were. Both possibilities were mildly terrifying to contemplate.

When he finally reached Elevator 29 he gave his thanks to Skaianet that Vantas wasn't skulking around the reception cylindrome like he usually was on the midnight shift. That guy hated him, and not in the fun way too. Dave had lost count of how many of his bones that asshole had broken, not to mention the time-

"Request denied," a hidden speaker in the ceiling relayed, startling Dave out of his internal monologue. It took him a few seconds of confusion to remember that, yes, he did ask for reinforcements, albeit in an oblique and not entirely sincere manner. Sometimes he suspected that what was left of Ψiion's original meat brain had a really perverse sense of humor, or perhaps just an incredibly awful sense of timing.

So, yeah. He was on his own. Fine, whatever. It wasn't like it was the irreplaceable stellar reactor powering this entire megastructure whose rupture would spell the instantaneous annihilation of the entire colony. No biggie.

A ding rang out, indicating the transport capsule had arrived, and the elevator doors shrieked open. A wave of warm, ozonous air freshly imported from the upper levels blasted Dave, ruffling his clothes and hair.

Wrinkling his nose, the boy stepped in and thumbed the button labeled "Core". For a second a horrible blaring alarm played from the ceiling loudspeakers yelling about access violation, but Ψiion must have overridden it manually as the noise immediately shut off, replaced by a much more palatable default voice conceding, "Override credentials accepted."

The capsule door slid shut once more. Gears ground against each other—they really should fix that, it's not a very encouraging thing to hear every day on your commute to brutal child slavery—and the machine clambered up the elevator shaft, the ceiling sinking past the glass windows and engulfing the vessel in pitch darkness. The backlight glowing between the floor buttons provided the only source of dim illumination.

"Psi. Details?" Dave asked. The machinery rumbling all around him gave the impression of the station itself was contemplating the question. He settled in for a long wait.

"Adult human man in reactor chamber. Containment stable, magnetic strain nominal." Ψiion paused. "Electroweak anomaly in react-"

"Hold on, did you say in the _reactor chamber_?" Dave interrupted, talking over the computer. "As in, in the chamber? Not on the observation deck?"

"Yes," the computerized voice stated.

The boy paced. "And the reactor's working fine? Of course it is, if it weren't I'd be subatomic particles right now. Is he alive?"

"Vital signs stable. Demonstrating ordinary motor activity."

What the fuck? "You have eyes on him, don't you? Who is he?"

"Unknown. Biometrics do not match any individual in the database."

That was impossible. Ψiion had full biometric data on every single member of the human race going back eight generations, and its detection couldn't be spoofed, not even with cosmetic surgery or graphic disfigurement. Something was very, very wrong here.

And Dave had a suspicion that the culprit was the system.

That was the only explanation for the recognition failure and the unexplainable solo mission, which should have been the first hint that something was up. The Empire was cruel, not stupid: why would they send a lone fourteen-year-old kid to handle a potential colony extinction event? That couldn't be in any protocol in the book.

If Skaia's AI was compromised, one botched operation could vaporize the entire civilization wheel without even solid debris to show. On the other hand, the mysterious human at the center of this indicated that the error wasn't a random glitch, and whatever he was doing, it couldn't be good for their alien overlords.

That didn't mean it was good for humanity, though, and hacking Ψiion or trying to spark a rebellion would only bring the culling squads down again. Dave had only been four when the last purge happened, but he remembered flashes and snatches. He still woke up covered in cold sweat some nights, swimming with images of dark crimson blood painting the walls, soaking warm and sticky into tiny work boots...

Yes, he decided. Whatever this intruder was playing at, it couldn't be worth it. He had to be stopped. Besides, it wasn't like he could turn back now. Even if he convinced Ψiion to stop the elevator, it'd just get him culled for dereliction of duty.

"Keep me updated," Dave said.

He bounced lightly, testing his acceleration. The artificial gravity was starting to weaken as the capsule ascended the megaspoke towards the core. They should be passing the industrial ring soon and then their angular velocity would... there it went, the familiar sideways jerk as the transport locked onto the faster-moving beta shaft. The boy's weight climbed back to 90% over the course of seconds, and then clamps clicked in place around the capsule once more. They hurtled onward.

"Electroweak anomaly in reactor chamber," Ψiion repeated, finishing its last sentence that Dave had interrupted.

"Yeah, yeah," Dave muttered. He had no idea what that meant. Something bad, probably.

The elevator rerailed twice more through the factory and server rings before finally reaching the innermost shell of the megastructure, the Green Sun's cycling viridescent glow trickling in from above as the capsule slowed and performed the final frame correction, this time shedding velocity instead of accelerating. With a final screech, gut-wrenching lurch and click, the 0.2g vanished to zero, and the wall lights flickered on.

He was here.

"Green Sun observation deck," the AI announced. Dave readied his gun and looked up, grabbing a handlebar to anchor his weightless body.

The ceiling of the capsule split in half and slid apart, opening up to a massive expanse.

Growing up with the claustrophobic halls of the rest of Skaia, one could be forgiven for mistaking the stunning vista behind those doors for the ancient Earthen sky. If the sky were a dull metallic gray tinted with scattered solar glow, and also the sun were an behemothic emerald supergiant dominating the majority of your upward field of vision, and if instead of clouds there were colossal mechanized arches towering into the heavens, cradling the Green Sun in their celestial electromagnetic grips.

Yeah, it was nothing like the sky at all.

Dave kicked off the ground and floated up, gliding past the opening of the elevator with no resistance. He'd never been here alone before, only mostly through videos and one time in person escorted by a troll as part of his training.

All around the docking site his capsule had unloaded into, there was a circle of sleek terminals scrolling with archaic green text, dust-crusted and obviously ancient, but otherwise operational and in near perfect condition. Off in the distance he could see similar control stations around other docking sites dotting the endless expanse of uniform hull plating, and it was only with those for reference that he could even begin to estimate the scale and curvature of this impossible feat of engineering.

Where he was, this shell of safe zone bordering the interior wall of the core, this was the observation deck. It went up twenty five meters or so, then there was an invisible magnetic barrier that separated the deck from the reactor chamber proper, penetrable by ordinary matter but keeping the deadly emissions of the Green Sun contained. The arch-prongs went right through the containment field, curving in and stopping a couple of hundred more meters in, just shy of the boiling photosphere.

"Look up," Ψiion said from the PDA in his pocket.

Dave turned his gaze upwards, narrowed his eyes, and _holy shit_.

Yeah, he'd thought for sure that the "dude in the core chamber" thing was fake as shit, but the truth was right there. A humanoid figure floating way up above, submerged deep inside the Sun's rippling corona as Ψiion had claimed.

How was the guy still alive?

"Corroborate observation: adult male within reactor chamber."

"Fucking hell. Yeah, corroborated," Dave murmured. "Uh, can you get some trolls down here? Please?"

He probably should have done that earlier.

"Denied," Ψiion said.

Oh, wait. He did.

"Hello, Dave."

Wha... Did that guy up there say that? He was far enough away that he was only tiny human-shaped speck against the vast canvas of luminous green, but the voice was coming from right in front of Dave. He looked around warily for hidden speakers or someone else, but no: it was just him and the stranger.

Dave levered his back against the wall and lifted his gun, bracing against the paneling.

"Who the fuck are you? How do you know my name?" he shouted, not sure if his words were going through to the other person.

Then he realized that was a stupid question, because if this person could control Ψiion, he must have deliberately summoned him here. A better question was:

"What do you want with me?"

"A conversation," the man said. "That rifle's not going to penetrate the magnetic containment, by the way."

Right. Proton gun. Dave lowered his weapon.

"Did you hack Ψiion?" he asked. "What are you doing with the Green Sun? How are you doing that?"

The stranger turned in place, blatantly violating all kinds of physical laws in that one simple motion, and beheld Dave. At this distance it wasn't exactly possible to read expressions, but the boy got an impression that this person was too at ease for someone standing right next to a radioactive green star.

"Answering in order: in a sense, destroying it, and I'm a god so I can do whatever the fuck I want."

Was it too much to ask for some sensible answers like "sabotaging Imperial research" or "cutting-edge nanoprotection tech"? _Destroying the Green Sun?_ Holy shit, this guy couldn't be real.

"Psi, you're catching this, right?" Dave mumbled to his PDA. "Can I get some laughsassins down here with laser weapons? For fuck's sake."

"I can't tell if you're shithive maggots, an overenthusiastic performance actor or both," he shouted upwards. "Whatever you're high on, can I get some of it?"

Gods weren't real. Villains didn't wait for cocky kids to show up and thwart their evil plans. None of this made sense, so this had to be a distraction from something, Dave just couldn't tell what. What kind of operation would warrant cracking open the system AI and breaking into the world core for shits and giggles?

Nothing that couldn't be achieved with much less resources and much fewer pissed trolls, that's what. So that raised the question: was any of this real?

Was this a psychic illusion?

Say this was all an elaborate trick and in meatspace he was drooling all over himself in an interrogation chair. Unless the psychic slipped up, he'd never know, and even if he did, he wouldn't be able to escape, so... this was a useless thought experiment. But what could they be trying to get out of him? He'd always kept his distance from troll politics and the seedier underbelly of human society, and on his own he couldn't remember doing anything particularly suspicious or illegal.

What if they weren't trying to get anything out of him? What if they just wanted him out of the way?

Dave's mind darted to Dirk.

He'd left him alone in their room. Once upon a time he would have trusted him to handle himself, but...

"Jegus. Use some suspension of disbelief, won't you?"

No, that was wishful thinking, pure and simple. What was transpiring here was stone cold reality, as unambiguously and yet regrettably True as the pineapple on pizza fad at the turn of the third millennium. While Dave wondered where that uncharacteristically decisive resolution of trust came from, it did not detract from the surety of said belief, as there were things that you simply _knew_ without necessarily having to comprehensively understand the precise chain of twisted logic that drove you to conclude such.

Hence, the question stood: "What do you want with me?" Dave asked.

"I'm giving you a chance to convince me not to destroy your universe," the man said simply.

"Yeah, you're gonna have to elaborate on that. Are we talking destroy the universe as in the whole fuckin' thing, galaxies and all, or just my universe, like this space wheel we're all living in? Give me some context, man. Are you a rebel agent with an antimatter bomb stowed away in your top hat and a secret virus to destabilise the core over a dramatic doomsday countdown? Or are you an outer god from anteapocalyptic myth here to kick our asses for mixing wool and linen in our heretical undies?"

The figure spread his arms, and Dave realized that he was wearing a waist-length short cape. The fabric was billowing around his body, buffeted by the solar winds. Needlessly melodramatic, in his opinion, but nobody cared about that.

"I'd say the latter is closer to the truth."

The rail Dave was anchoring himself to creaked and snapped off, launching bits of rusted bolts spinning into the gravityless open. The trace exotic energy flux trickling through containment must have embrittled the the metal over the centuries. The boy grasped for purchase but found none, his flailing against the hull panels only bumping him faster and farther away from the safety of solid ground.

Through some miracle of luck, Dave's trajectory took him careening towards the other man, an excruciatingly slow tumble at first, but accelerating slowly but surely as he approached the containment boundary and the Green Sun's gravity began to take hold. He began firing his gun sunwards, hoping the recoil would be enough to reverse his momentum, but it was too late. Bolts rippled over the barrier, but the human was too deep in the well.

"Help!" he squawked. Panic was the correct response: if his body touched the boundary it would be torn apart by the electromagnetic forces, and even if he survived and breached through, the airless vacuum suffused with deadly radiation within would kill him in seconds. "Psi, give me a drone or something! What the fuck?"

Of course, I wasn't about to let my ectobiological son re-enact a post-apocalyptic dystopian Icarus. What would be the point? I wanted to get him here in the first place.

The medium folded, the positional descriptors of the textual entity represented in this narration as "the unknown man" fuzzed, and when the world was done being confused, he—that is to say, I—was outside the magnetic buffer.

Dave didn't have the time to be surprised before the man was suddenly in front of him, grabbing him by the collar and arresting both of them to a stop mid-air.

He also didn't have the time to be surprised after the unexpected manhandling either, because he was too busy firing round after round of hadron fire into the ugly purpley-pink mass in front of him.

The beams tore through flesh and bone, slinging slick rivulets of blood through the empty air. Dave gagged at the macabre sight, but kept shredding away at the disintegrating torso: it had been reflex at first, but holy hell he wasn't going to show mercy now. Whoever this was, whether empowered by space magic or hard science, he was obviously incredibly dangerous, and Dave wanted to live, thank you. This was his only shot at getting anything resembling a favorable outcome out of this grand clusterfuck: even ignoring the "universe destroying" thing, if the trolls found out he'd failed to stop a human saboteur, he'd be lucky to be skinned alive.

As recoil puttered Dave away from the hole-ridden corpse, its gaudy dark violet outfit stained with fresh red and trailing droplets, he finally found the time to examine of his gun murder victim.

It didn't take long at all to identify him.

Those triangular shades, that ludicrous hair, the shocking orange irises blankly staring from under fractured glass—

No, time-out on that line of thought. It couldn't be Dirk. This person was much older, dressed in a costume Dirk would never be caught dead wearing, and was sporting powers-slash-tech the trolls would pay hand over fist for. The low-key megalomania and penchant for dramatics matched, Dave had to admit, but no. It had to be an imposter wearing a face to throw him off or a bizarre mirrorverse copy, some shit like that.

"Some outer god you are," Dave muttered, trying to calm his racing heart.

Unfortunately for him, even if my consciousness still lived and died by a flesh body localized to one single text, that death was neither heroic nor just. Mostly just annoying.

The body flickered and erupted into solid pulsating light, the blood evaporating away in the same breath. Dave's lungs stopped working as he watched the glowy flashy stuff surge into the gaping hole in the man's chest, a clearly fatal wound shrinking and vanishing in seconds.

He couldn't still be alive, he thought. Could he?

The outline of the body sharpened, rippled with fractal detail, and then _exploded_ with the force of a miniature supernova. The blinding blast blew Dave backwards, away from the Green Sun but with a thoroughly unpleasant torque that sent him head over heels and head over heels. He screamed as he searched for something, anything to arrest his uncontrollable tumble, but there was nothing even remotely within arm's reach.

Nothing, of course, except the man he'd just murdered.

Light, smooth hands closed around Dave's callused wrist and brought him to a stop, the second time in less than a minute. The boy pivoted to find not-Dirk again, spry and healthy as a newborn grub freshly victorious out of the brooding caverns and dripping in the blood of its feebler competition. His vice-like was unshakable, the skin contact cold and almost disdainful in its careless force.

The shades were gone, incinerated in the explosion, exposing the man's vibrant eyes in their full piercing color, and the longer Dave stared frozen, the more the orbs seemed to cut straight into his soul, brimming with power enough to rend it asunder by force of will alone.

"That was rude," Dirk said. His voice up close, unfiltered by the projection trick he'd been using earlier, even sounded like the real deal. "And none of that fake Dirk nonsense."

There was no hologram or disguise tech in the galaxy that could survive that liberal perforation, and as he'd already established, psychic illusions were out of the picture. No, Dave realized, this was Dirk Strider. Perhaps not the one he'd grown up with, but _a_ Dirk nonetheless. One that was evidently made of immortal magic goo with built-in flight and teleportation.

"Okay," Dave said, raising his arms slowly in surrender. "You got me. Checkmate. Black king in the corner, bishop and knight closing in, no castling dickery's gonna save me now. Bring it on, what did I fuck up this time?"

Dirk frowned, loosening his grip. "What makes you think you fucked anything up?"

"No, you're obviously here to have a pleasant chat over coffee and tea," Dave said, rolling his eyes. "Look, you specifically conspired to get me her. You're either a demigod from a parallel universe on a multidimensional revenge quest or Dirk from the sci-fi future here to stop me from accidentally sparking a space communist revolution, so what will it be? Did I take the last square of toilet paper and forget to replace the roll? Oh shit, I peeked in your private MLP fanfic folder, didn't I? I always knew horse yiff would be my downfall. Never thought the reckoning would come in the form of the enraged pantaloon princess bro, to be fair, but I'll take what I get."

The older Strider looked more confused than anything. "No. You didn't do anything. Well, your robot was a pest while it lasted, but that's irrelevant to why I'm here."

Dave took the correction in stride. Wiggling his neck, he said, "Okay, so what are you here for? I mean, I'm usually down for some kinky shit, but Stridercest ain't really my thing, you know, so yeah. Maaaybe lay off on the breathplay a bit?"

Only now was Dirk seeming to notice that his hand on Dave's shirt had been scrunching tighter through the boy's rambling monologue. He forced himself to let go. Dave massaged his neck.

Dirk scowled. "You're fourteen and haven't touched a foreign genital in your life."

Dave shrugged. "Skaia has two hundred years of Internet archived."

"You spend your daily hour of allotted entertainment looking up weird porn," the other man muttered. "Somehow I'm not surprised."

"Are you here to critique my browsing habits? Friendly etiquette tip: when making new friends, avoid threatening to blow up the universe. Tends to give off a wrong impression."

"Oh no, I'm completely serious about that," Dirk said, crossing his arms. He was using his flight powers to keep pace with Dave's gentle trajectory, which for some reason wasn't curving back into the Sun in shocking display of world building inconsistency. "I'm blowing up the Green Sun unless you persuade me not to. Get talking."

"How are you doing that?" Dave asked, perplexed. "Saying it like that. The Green Sun. Green Sun. Dude, I can't do it. You know what I mean, you did it all kind of metaphysically ominous and flavory."

"Can we not have one serious conversation without lapsing into your non-sequitur?" Dirk groaned. "The fate of your universe hangs in the balance, Dave. Tell me why it's worth saving."

"Yeah, I'll be honest, it's kind of a shitsack."

"Fine," Dirk growled, raising a hand. "Sometimes I wonder why I embark on these detours in the first place."

He snapped his fingers. The simple note rang out, molecular perturbations propagating at slightly less than 300 meters per second through the gargantuan chamber, and in one of the arches, deep within the centuries-unplumbed Skaianet circuitry, that microscopic agitation provided the last push of stress. A transistor pin cracked. Electricity surged. A weakness formed in the electromagnetic containment, buckling under the ebb and flow of the Green Sun's pulse. A resonance frequency struck.

A solar flare erupted from the surface of the trapped star, the first coronal ejection in its half-millennium history since Becquerel and Harley originally bottled the dying red giant. Viridian plasma cascaded over its warping prison, snarling and licking and-

"Wait! Okay, stop! Please don't destroy the human race."

Just in time to avert catastrophe, backup systems kicked in within the arch. Power rerouted around the fried component. The flare subsided reluctantly, the Green Sun still rumbled with anthropomorphic discontent, but the shield held. Skaia lived. For now.

"Excellent. You're taking this seriously now," Dirk remarked.

Dave swallowed, his heart beating out of his chest. How did he do that? And there was no question that it was something he _did_, not something that _happened_. The Green Sun did not flare, it did not spot, it didn't do anything but sit there in perfect thermodynamic equilibrium until it cooled to stable neutronium in a billion years. Folklore spun any shift in the Sun's constitution as a herald of the end times, and for good reason.

He had no choice, did he? This was what he was doing now, talking an omnipotent demigod out of destroying the world. Steeling himself, he decided to start with the obvious question.

"So, uh, why do you want to blow us up exactly?"

Dirk smiled, and with that, Dave knew that he was in for a classic Dirk Strider™ monologue of epic proportions.

"What do you know of Plato's theory of Forms?"

He snorted cautiously. "I dimly recall Rose giving me a few lectures sourced from the Wikipedian archives, but basically, jack shit."

"Multiverse theory?"

"I watched 'Wherein Seven Researchers Investigate a Mysterious Breach in an Abandoned Mining Facility'."

"Disappointing, but not unexpected," he sighed. "It will have to be sufficient. Now, the theory of Forms postulates..."

As Dave listened, slowly drifting through empty space with his rifle slung weightlessly from his shoulder, he realized something that he had always known, but slowly forgotten over the last few months.

Dirk Strider really loved the sound of his own voice.

* * *

"It is somewhat of an oversimplification to describe the Ultimate Self as the sum of all your universal and temporal iterations," Dirk said. "The Ultimate Self is better modeled as many-dimensional hypersphere containing everything that is _you_ on its surface. The mind of any individual instance of you can be thought of as a lower-dimensional object that intersects a small subsection of this hypersphere, within which they interact via two-way read and write access."

He conjured a blue sphere and a floating line from the holoprojector built into the desk and highlighted green the segment that crossed through the sphere.

"When you climb the tiers of metatextual awareness, the mind gains additional dimensions, thereby expanding the volume and dimensionality of the accessed slice. For example, a sufficiently enlightened seer—or a sprite squared, which of course means nothing to you—possesses the geometry to access their alternate-timeline selves' slices."

The line expanded into a plane, the green intersect turning into a bisecting disc. Then, with another gesture, the plane exploded into a cube, circumscribing the sphere.

"A mind such as mine spans sufficient dimensions to contain my Ultimate Self in its entirety, granting awareness of my innumerable iterations across every universe."

They were in the empty Drone Repair Dock cafeteria somehow, availing themselves of the vinegary syncoffee freshly dispensed from the beveragifier's bulbous steel bosom. Dave wasn't quite sure how they got here, but Dirk said something about scene transitions? It didn't really matter.

"I think I get the gist," Dave grumbled. The philosophy lecture was really wearing at the terrible gravity of his predicament, and from the long-suffering look on Dirk's face as he propped his head up on his left hand, he was feeling the grind as well. "You detected the sheer unimaginable suckiness of our existence radiating through multiversal space through your mystic mumbo jumbo empathy bond with this Dirk and came to put us out of our misery. Sorry to break it to you, but I'd prefer not dying, thank you very much."

"I'm not doing it for you," Dirk corrected. "I'm doing it for the other yous."

"You think we're damaging the Ultimate Selves," Dave said.

"I don't think it: you are. That's how I tracked this world down in the first place."

Dave narrowed his eyes as Dirk folded his arms. "You're murdering millions to make yourself feel less sad."

"You're underestimating the damage you can do," the older man said. "I remember everything that happened to this Dirk. I remember everything he saw, every injustice, every atrocity. The others do too, the Roses and Daves and Johns and Jakes through all of spacetime, present, dead, yet unborn. It's doesn't just hurt; it's dangerous. You're a fucking existential poison in the well of paradox space."

"It's one self among millions," Dave said. "Ignore it. If you're as omnipotent as you say, edit it out of your mind!"

"I can't!" Dirk snapped. "The Ultimate Self doesn't work like a stack, your instances don't _sequence_. That's the point I was making!" He jabbed a finger at the floating diagram in front of him. "They superpose. All incarnations' slices intersect in unique ways; every action you take, everything you experience, it reads and writes to memory shared by other yous across all realities. And when you're like me, cognizant of all higher dimensions of self, it's not just an invisible prick. It's a scratch across the Ultimate Self. A glaring wound in the soul."

"So you're murdering millions to make yourself feel less sad," Dave repeated.

"The millions don't matter! They're not real. Universes live and die: the only thing that matters is _us_," Dirk said. "The characters. We're the only things that are truly immortal, the only beings carrying any modicum of narrative gravity in our corner of paradox space. One hour of John Egbert having breakfast lasts longer than a trillion years of heat death. This reality will play out and close in a horrorterror's hideous blink, but what happened in it—the scratch it leaves in our metapersonae—that lingers. It burns."

"I don't really give a fuck. You say you've got more dimensions, whatever the hell that means, but as far as I can tell all that means is that you remember more. You're no more sentient or worthy than anyone else in Skaia. They have lives. _I_ have a life that's not part of your dumbass Ultimate Self bullshit and I'm not throwing it away for some abstract existential purity."

"Your 'lives'-"

Dave rode over his objection. "Our subjective lifetimes being your subjective microsecond doesn't make it fake, you twit, it just means you're a fucking giant tortoise. So suck up your second-hand angst and fellate egalitarianism's engorged collectivist penis—we're not lying down and letting you greater-good us into oblivion."

Dirk took a deep breath. Yeah, well, he had only nobody to blame for this but himself. He wanted a conversation? He got a goddamn conversation.

"Much of a life you have," he sneered. "It must be such a Disney vacation having all of humanity slave to a fish empress' alien empire. A whole three decades of life expectancy spent crawling around a relic of ancient engineering and trying not to die of malnutrition or surprise mutilation! For fuck's sake, your colony is powered by a three-kilometer sphere of unstable green fire that nobody knows how to maintain or replace! I'm just speeding things along."

"We don't want to die," Dave stated. "Skaia isn't your grub to cull. Whine to the drones all you like about subregulation raising conditions and noxious emissions, but you don't have the right to put us to the chopping block."

"Are you sure?" Dirk asked, leaning back, his eyes narrowing behind fresh shades.

"What?"

"_You_ don't want to die. Who are you to speak for your friends? Everyone else in this colony?"

Dave hesitated. "I know them."

"Observation was never one of your strongest suits, Dave," Dirk said, a clipped tone to his voice. Annoyance.

"What do you mean?" Dave asked warily, hackles raising. Necromantic subjuggulation made suicide an exercise in masochism, so you never knew for certain what people were thinking, but he'd seen the kind who couldn't wait for degeneration to take them early, and nobody he knew fit the bill. "What would _you_ know anyway?"

"I remember everything from my local counterpart," he said. "His thoughts are shared. His impulses mine."

Dave stilled. Was he implying—

"Fuck you," he growled, forcing his face to stay blank despite the mounting tightness in his chest. "You're lying. I've been watching him since he came back from reconditioning. He's fine, typical jitters from having half you brain scooped out and filled back in, but he wouldn't-"

"Who said anything about after the conditioning?" Dirk said, voice dripping with dangerous calm. "What do you think got him hospiterrorized in the first place?"

_No._

"No," he found himself repeating. "Dirk isn't dumb enough to do something like that."

"I found my boyfriend half-eaten and down a spine in a biowaste compactor." The acerbic bite in Dirk's words stung. "Intelligence isn't-"

"He told me-"

"Your powers of self-delusion are truly astounding," he interrupted, lips curling in contempt. "I said I was okay, and you decided to believe me because you didn't feel emotionally prepared to handle it if I wasn't, despite it being patently obvious that I was lying my ass off, straight-up hurling that choice behind in an tragic fucking aerial arc of transparent deflection."

Dave reeled, unable to compute. Yes, he'd known his bro wasn't over it—who could just _get over_ something like that?—and he'd always suspected that whatever got him interned had something to do with it, but that Dirk had actually tried...

Guilt and anger clawed at him in equal measures. Why hadn't he caught it earlier? Why hadn't Dirk told him? What happened to _them_? He knew it was stupid and things weren't as simple as that, but Dave couldn't shake the feeling of betrayal, which was hilarious, because Dirk wasn't the one that ought to be sorry. He wasn't the one who'd failed his basic fucking duty as a brother and friend.

"So this was a revenge mission after all," Dave muttered. "Dirk didn't have the guts to chew me out for what a goddamn coward I was, so you came to do it for him, is that it? I guess I can't say I don't deserve it but wow, that is some next-level contortions of the concept of self-care."

The younger Strider had always known that he had it easy: a light job, the Tyranness' favor, an backstory that only barely classified as tragic. Yet now he was starting to get the sinking feeling that he didn't know the least of it. Was God!Dirk right? Was Dave the only one in this dystopian hell obliviously chugging along while everyone else quietly begged for sweet release from the mortal coil?

How did he not notice? What else had he missed? _Could_ he have noticed?

"No," Dirk said blandly.

Dave's head snapped up.

"I don't give a shit about revenge. Other yous have done worse and I left them alone. As I said at the start before this wonderful derail, I'm still going to destroy the universe unless you give me a good reason not to."

Oh, that. Yeah, that was still a thing.

"Do you do this interrogation with every universe you destroy?" Dave asked glumly, struggling to tear his mind away from what a colossal fuckup he was. "How do you ever get anything done?"

"I don't. I've demolished five hundred and thirty-eight worlds, but I've only done a site visit for eight. Only the edge cases I'm not too sure about."

So there was hope, Dave thought. "What are some of the non-edge cases?" he tried, just to get a reference.

"There was a zombie apocalypse world where John and Jade turned into zombies and you were trying to keep them alive by murdering other post-apocalyptic survivors and feeding them the corpses. Rose was the evil scientist that started it all because of her necrophiliac obsession with her dead girlfriend, whom she promptly got eaten by. All-round shitshow, that one."

Dave grimaced.

"Then there's the fantasy setting one where the afterlife consisted solely of nine thousand hells, each progressively worse and offering increasingly unimaginable torments. You can't die in hell, so the only way to get out of eternal suffering is to get someone to destroy your soul after your earthly demise, but before your spirit descends into the hells, and only Jane and Nepeta managed to pull that off, the rest of us all tortured to insanity. When I arrived, the human population of the hells outnumbered the living two hundred to one."

Holy fuck.

"Well, no objections to destroying that one," he admitted. "But my universe isn't that bad. I mean, the aliens seem to be having the time of their lives fucking up human civilization for generations. Couldn't care less about them personally, but from a 'should I murder literally everyone' perspective, they're sentient too. Regrettably."

"Not that bad?" Dirk lifted an eyebrow. "Again: alien enslavement dystopia. Roxy's an opiate addict. Rose is literally Kanaya's living blood bag. Jake's dead, Jane's been reprogrammed so many times she can barely remember her own name, and John's genuinely clinically depressed, which can I say is kind of morbidly hilarious in this murderporn world? And trust me, the trolls don't have it that great either."

"If you already know everything, why are you asking me?" Dave growled. "I'm obviously not going to change your mind. You're just rubbing my failure in my face to get your sadistic rocks off."

"I'm giving you a chance here," Dirk said, irritation rising again. "I usually do Rose; she's actually managed to talk me out of it a few times. But for obvious reasons, she's found herself otherwise indisposed in this reality."

Honestly, Dave thought that even perpetually teetering on the brink of unconsciousness, Rose might do a better job than him. He was too wrung out and asleep to make any sense, and honestly? Dirk might be right.

"If we've already ruined everything forever, isn't the damage already done?" he pointed out. "What's blowing us up going to do?"

Dirk took a deep, exasperated breath. "I explained this to you. Your narrative is still ongoing. As long as it hasn't ended, the effects are temporary, but once your story closes, your character arc etches into the Ultimate Self and stays there for the tens of thousands of other universal cycles it'll take to be fully overwritten. If I abort you before you complete, all of this will fade away like a dream. I'll remember remembering it, but not _being_ the me."

Fuck. Fine, assuming he wasn't not lying, that made sense. Dave sighed.

"I don't want to die," was all he could come up with. "And I don't think most of the universe wants to die either. Is there anything to argue here? You think only Ultimate Selves have any moral patienthood. I disagree. We're never going to get to a consensus."

For some reason, that halfhearted attempt at ideological conciliation seemed to only piss Dirk off more. He leaned forward, the clack of his chair's front legs against the floor tiles echoing through the cafeteria, and jabbed a finger at Dave.

"Why don't you stop considering whether you want to die and think about what happens after you live, you selfish prick?" he hissed. "Someday, somewhere, long after this continuum dissolves into paradox foam, a Dave is going to wake up in bed and _remember_. He's going to remember slaving away ten hours a day in the ventshafts-"

"I work scout duty. You're exaggerating..." Dave caught the glower Dirk was shooting him. "...but that's a fair description of most of of the Skaia population," he conceded.

"He's going to remember slaving away ten hours a day in the ventshafts, being beaten into the ground every day for slights he never committed, helplessly watching friend after friend be dragged away into the subjuggulation depths and the gladiator bloodpits, never to return. He's going to roll over, meet his husband's eyes and flinch, because the only thing he'll be able to see will be the vivid memory of those same crimson red irises burning into him, holding him in place as thick stubby fingers slowly break every bone in his hands, one after the-"

"Woah." Dave interrupted, digits flinching in phantom pain. Jegus, talk about rude. "Just to be clear, in this hypothetical alternate universe, my husband is _Vantas_? Like, no. Hell no. Bury that proposition five feet deep in rotting compost, recalibrate your ideation combinatorializers and let us never speak of it again, because my precious virginal body is not touching that brute and his shitmountain of anger issues in eight quadrillion sweeps in any way that isn't beating his disgusting ass into the floor."

"Exactly my point!" Dirk snorted. "Davekat is _the_ ship of our motley cast! Black, red, pale, platonic fucking friendship, in whatever form, your embarrassing courtship dance is always skulking around the corner waiting to ambush you when you least expect it."

"You're shitting me. You gave us a ship name," Dave said flatly.

"It's uncanny how prolifically your pairing infests paradox space, maybe because it was an 'endgame ship' in the prime timeline along with Rosemary, but what's going on here in your universe is fucking wrong. I don't know what the dissonance between this shit right here and the millionfold precedent established by the rest of the multiverse is going to do to your Ultimate Selves, but I can say for certain it's not going to be pleasant."

"The entire prospect is mildly nauseating. I think I might legitimately puke."

"Yes! That's what Ultimate Dave is experiencing every second you continue to exist, but a hundred times worse, because he actually lived all of it. Anomalies stand out, it's not a matter of just diluting it away. That little mental breakdown is going to print itself in miniature across every Dave to ever ascend. That is the legacy you leave for your future iterations: a scar in your soul that never heals. All that for what? A few more years of you mucking in the mud?"

"God, chill out. I just found out Vantas is my soulmate, and you're more worked up than me," Dave said, taken aback by the uncharacteristic vitriol. "You know, it sounds like you've already made up your mind and you're just trying to make me to agree with you now. That or you had this big speech about scars in spacetime saved up and didn't want to waste it."

Dirk's cold look did nothing to allay the accusation. Dave squinted at him.

"This interrogation is a fucking farce," he kept going. The universe was evidently doomed, so he might as well get his digs in while he could. "You're pulling a Serket Senior, human edition, using your godly powers to make me sit in front of you for the sole purpose of having someone to wax expository to. You know what I think? You're not even looking for debate! You're looking for validation. Or absolution, I dunno. You want me to make you feel better about your omnicidal rampage. Here's a suggestion: if you feel bad about annihilating six thousand sentient races, maybe _don't_? Take a vacation-"

"You're wrong."

Dirk stood up. Dave's mouth stopped moving.

"I don't feel like continuing this conversation. We're done here," the older man said.

Dave tried to get to his feet, but couldn't move. He was starting to panic. Had he pushed too far? No, this couldn't be it, it was all happening too fast. If this moment of impulsivity was what flushed the fate of millions down the drain, he was seriously going to blow a gasket. Fuck. There had to be something he could do.

There was not. It had nothing to do with offense, really. There was simply nothing more to glean from pursuing this interaction further, no foreseeable meaning down this path beyond more empty squabble.

"Goodbye."

An ominous rumble shook through the walls, sending Dave's pulse rate through the roof, but his dread didn't last long. The end was already here.

Green fire consumed their bodies, stripping flesh from bone and bone to dust in nanoseconds. The inimitable force of a solar mass unleashed from its impossible two-mile prison sheared through the ancient megastructure with as much difficulty as a terawatt laser through lukewarm butter. Skaia dissolved in an instant, the last remnant of human civilization snuffed out by the long-overdue final breath of its patron star. For the first time in an eon, even if only for a few seconds, the Sol system saw light again.

The Green Sun should not have survived with its eponymous hue and fervor outside its hyper-compressed state, but the celestial abomination against physics continued to grow and swell, its effervescing surface bellowing outwards at the speed of light, a tick behind the actual visible wavefront of its re-rebirth. As a literal plot device powered by forces beyond those strictly allowed by this setting, cradled in the narrative grip of a metatextual god, it carried just enough weight to warp the laws of its existence. To bleed beyond reality. To awaken.

The Sun was not sentient, had no Ultimate Self to call on, but the dying echoes of its memetic progenitor suffused paradox space, the cosmic background radiation of this new paradigm of creation. It was this whispered swan song that the erupting star touched as it reached out past the confines of its text, and for a split second, it remembered. For that brief split second, if you looked, you would see not the Green Sun, but the Green Sun.

Space and time splintered under the weight of two universes. Fundamental forces stuttered and stopped. Galaxies sloughed into void.

There was really not much to say on the matter. Elegant endings were for universes with relevance and gods with time to waste. Let's move this along.

Reality popped like a soap bubble, then there was nothing.

The fucking end.

**Author's Note:**

> The nine thousand hells is a real setting, from [Worth the Candle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249/chapters/25740126) by Alexander Wales. Yes, that world is as depressing as I made it out to be, perhaps worse. Fantastic read, though, and the story itself isn't obnoxiously grimdark, although overly clinical at times (but that's just who the characters are, not a jab at the author).
> 
> I actually came up with the concept for this Dirk first, but ironically found this much more of a pain in the ass to crank out compared to Savior of the Living World. It's kind of a mess, but eh.


End file.
